28 July
Emma leaves my phone on the table.
She knows it’s no use to me anyway.
All I can do with it now is make things worse.
I try phoning Ed again anyway. Nothing. Over and over I call, thinking that surely he will pick up, I’m his wife, but he ignores it. Or it’s in another room, on silent, as he tries to block me from his mind. It is after 11 p.m.
But Poppy, I think. Poppy.
I pace the house, hot, panicked and feeling my brain start to twirl out of control as it does when I can’t focus in on one thing.
I call, and call.
Liam and his wife too. They don’t pick up their phones either, presumably asleep.
I need to get out of this house.
I need to get to Ed.
I grab the car keys and leave, saturated even in the distance between the front door and the car from rain that while I’ve been speaking to Emma has become torrential.
I put the key in the ignition and press a boot down on the clutch but something doesn’t feel right and I realise: it’s because I am drunk.
Even in my chaos, I know I can’t drive while I’m drunk. Can’t risk hurting somebody or hurting myself when I have – and it’s the only thing I can think of that matters now when there used to be a plethora of reasons, the ones that make up a whole life and person – a child.
I sit in the drive and take my phone out of my pocket.
Who can I call, at this time of night? Who will help me?
Josephine is too far away, geographically and in her life, from this whole situation. We are so distant now; another thing the video has taken from me. I look down at my pyjamas and boots and see rock bottom.
My dad: I still can’t let him see how bad things are. Still can’t paint the whole picture.
Old friends are so removed now that starting from scratch on how things got here seems impossible and laboured. And so I get out of the car and run through the rain, to the only person I can think of who would let me in now, in the dead of night.
‘Cora!’ I shout into the silver intercom as the rain hammers down noisily. ‘I know it’s late. But I need help.’
And she lets me in like good friends – whatever I know about those, now – always do.